Inspirational Quotes by William Barclay
“There is a time when to avoid trouble is to store up trouble, and when to seek for a lazy and a cowardly peace is to court a still greater danger.”
topics: Apathy
“In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.”
topics: Relationships
“It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so.”
topics: The Bible
“It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.”
topics: Truth
“The true, the genuine worship is when man, through his spirit, attains to friendship and intimacy with God. True and genuine worship is not to come to a certain place; it is not to go through a certain ritual or liturgy; it is not even to bring certain gifts. True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.”
topics: Worship
“But the best definition of it is to say that heaven is that state where we will always be with Jesus, and where nothing will separate us from Him any more.”
topics: Heaven
“The awful importance of this life is that it determines eternity.”
topics: Eternity
“Covetousness is therefore, a sin with a very wide range. If it is the desire for money, it leads to theft. If it is the desire for prestige, it leads to evil ambition. If it is the desire for power, it leads to sadistic tyranny. If it is the desire for a person, it leads to sexual sin.”
topics: Envy
“A reverent agnosticism can be on occasion a better evangelism than a religion which knows all the answers.”
― William Barclay ,
“Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.”
topics: Endurance
“If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach.”
topics: Doubt
“The Christian is a [person] of joy... A gloomy Christian is a contradiction of terms, and nothing in all religious history has done Christianity more harm than its connection with black clothes and long faces.”
topics: Christians
“Grant that the voice of our own desires may not be speaking so insistently that we become deaf to your word.”
― William Barclay ,
from Barclay Prayer Book
“Jesus insisted that the greatest ritual service is the service of human need. It is an odd thing to think that, with the possible exception of that day in the synagogue at Nazareth, we have no evidence that Jesus ever conducted a ‘church’ service in all his life on earth, but we have abundant evidence that he fed the hungry and comforted the sad and cared for the sick. Christian service is not the service of any liturgy or ritual; it is the service of human need. Christian service is not monastic retreat; it is involvement in all the tragedies and problems and demands of the human situation.”
“So often we have a kind of vague, wistful longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really to enter into them is to believe them with the clutching intensity of a drowning man.”
topics: Believing
“Whenever religion becomes a depressing affair of burdens and prohibitions, it ceases to be true religion.”
“His very use of parables shows that it was his conviction that the things of this world can lead a man’s thoughts direct to God, if he will only see.”
― William Barclay ,
“When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a father's hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer.”
topics: Believing
Group of Brands
© 2025 Bibleportal.com All rights reserved.
William Barclay was an author, radio and television presenter, Church of Scotland minister and Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow.
While professor, he decided to dedicate his life to "making the best biblical scholarship available to the average reader". The eventual result was the Daily Study Bible, a set of 17 commentaries on the New Testament, published by Saint Andrew Press, the Church of Scotland's publishing house.
The 17 volumes of the set were all best-sellers and continue to be so to this day. Barclay wrote many other popular books, always drawing on scholarship but written in a highly accessible style.